A fun reminder that Aang was a terrifyingly powerful Avatar.
Most Avatars are informed of their newfound destinies at the age of 16 to begin their training. Because of the approaching war Aang was told of his status at the age of 12. He had already mastered airbending, and in the span of a year he mastered the other three elements, the avatar state, and energybending. He also learned lightning redirection and seismic sense (a technique no previous Avatar had even encountered). In the span of a year.
What y’all think ‘gifted child’ discourse is saying: I used to be special and now I’m not and that makes me sad.
What ‘gifted child’ discourse is ACTUALLY saying: The way many educational systems treat children who’ve been identified as ‘gifted’ is actively harmful in that it a. obliges kids to give up socialising with their same-age peers in favour of constantly courting the approval of adult ‘mentors’ who mostly don’t give a shit about them, b. demands that they tie their entire identity to a set of standards that’snot merely unsustainable, but intentionally so, because its unstated purpose is to weed out the ‘unworthy’ rather than to provide useful goals for self-improvement, and c. denies them opportunities to learn useful life skills in favour of training them up in an excruciatingly narrow academic skill-set that’s basically useless outside of an institutional career path that the vast majority of them will never be allowed to pursue.
also: the way “gifted” children are taught largely just rewards them for already knowing things or having a specific skill come easily to them, and thus not only gives them severe anxiety about asking for help or not knowing something right away for fear of disappointing those adult mentors, but also actively discourages them from learning HOW to learn things and pick up new skills, thus sabotaging any life they might try to pursue outside of that institutional career.
National Geographic on Facebook: this is a facial reconstruction of a teenage girl who lived 9000 years ago based on her remains!
half the comments: men criticizing her looks and saying she’s unattractive and mannish
anyway this is the reconstruction and I always enjoy seeing the faces of prehistoric humans and how much we have in common over thousands of years despite how incredibly different our lives are. I support her and I think she looks wonderful.
everyone in the replies of this post saying “well I think she’s pretty!” missed the whole damn point lmao
I remember watching a documentary once where historians were trying to work out who a dead girl was and what her life was like. I’m pretty sure they dated the body back to the early Victorian era, and established pretty early on that she lived in poverty, died young, and was most certainly a prostitute.
The grand finale of the show was the reveal of her reconstructed face. Now, bare in mind that through their investigations they discovered that she had lived an awful life and died an agonizing death (syphilis iirc). So, you can imagine my disgust when the historians reacted with disappointment at the reveal of her ‘face’. This poor girl, who had suffered terribly, was obviously not the poor, tragic beauty they had been hoping for.
She was plain, maybe some would say she was ugly, but what was truly hideous was the fact that you could practically see the sympathy these historians had for this poor girl slip away as they looked at her ‘face’, and you could certainly hear it in their voices.
Even in death our value rests on the basis of our looks. Sympathy is conditional - based on where you fall on the looks scale.
Science: *gives us the miracle of seeing long-dead faces*
